Layers of Liffey - by Bert Spinks
ISLAND | ISSUE 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
It’s not an easy walk, but if you haul yourself up Drys Bluff, you’ll get a sense of where the Liffey River carves its course through the bush, running parallel to a grey road, travelling east until it emerges into the flat fields of farming communities.
You can see for miles, but so much remains unseen. Forest conceals habitat, and the houses here, often in small clearings, are well hidden. The high panorama doesn’t tell a lot. Scrape your way back down the scree, slip down sandstone steps, hear the stories told, and begin to understand something of the history of this place.
*
In 1885, a school was built. It’s still standing, renovated and refurbished, on a small rise below Drys Bluff. It sits beneath its bulk, but not in its lee: it seems to be the windiest spot in the valley. For six decades the small school took in students, and I cannot help but wonder how much was learned beyond elocution and arithmetic. In moments alone in the old school building, I am absorbed by how the outside world seeps in. A horse brays, a brace of plovers shriek. A beam of light projects leaf patterns on the floorboards. Wind collides with the woodwork, brusque and boisterous.
Much of my education was made up of such moments, too. The way it rains here in the Liffey, I wonder how often the teacher’s voice was drowned by the weather hammering on the corrugated roof.
*
Harley Chilcott is 91, and attended the Liffey School in the 1930s. She has the indomitable look of many Tasmanian grandmothers. She has no shortage of memories of her classes. Engrossed, I listen as she describes walking a couple of miles downstream every morning, even in snow.
‘Do you remember where you sat?’ I ask. She points to the precise spot, and names those who sat at the desks in front and behind hers.
‘The Cooper boys were all up the front,’ she says, plotting the room’s layout with hand gestures. ‘And the teacher was always standing there, next to the fireplace.’
Harley copped the cane once, ‘for making four spelling mistakes’. But the memory that strikes her most keenly is the snacks at recess. ‘Jolly little hard apples,’ she says, wincing, as if the taste is still on her tongue 80 years later. As if their sourness was worse than the sting of the cane.
‘I don’t know where they got them from, but they were the nastiest, horriblest little apples.’
“I don’t know where they got them from, but they were the nastiest, horriblest little apples.”
*
Often, the white weatherboard of the old school seems to attract sunshine, even when the dolerite crags behind glower and darken. The recent ruby-red roof makes the old school look something like a family cottage. Several unusual businesses flourish in the valley, but this building, now the community hall, is the only space that Liffey locals share.
There’s a monthly market here, with an eclectic selection of wares, modestly displayed for sale beneath marquees around the building, their makers standing with them. There is very good, dark honey and slender bottles of rocoto chilli sauce. But the main activity takes place inside: Devonshire teas do brisk trade, and the most important exchange is in the currency of story.
The hall fills with people: there’s a flurry of activities, a flutter of discussions. Films are recommended, reports are given on road conditions, gardens are compared with gusto. Chairs are shuffled to make space for anyone who arrives; conversation is accommodating.
There are theories that humans developed language through social gatherings such as these. Perhaps gossip and small talk are not trivial. Common ground can be sought; differences can be smoothed over. As one bloke at the market tells me, ‘We rarely see each other, so you can only find out the things you need to know here.’
There are several scone-makers, and they are the mediators of this bazaar. One, Diana, comes up from Hobart once a month to participate in the market. She works in mental health and believes that events like the Liffey market make an enormous difference in rural communities. It’s easy to agree.
*
‘They closed the school when they knew I was coming,’ Ray Jordan tells me. It’s a well-worn line, but a good one. The school closed in 1947, so every weekday with up to 60 kids he jumped on a sardine-tin school bus to the next township – to Bracknell in the morning and back in the afternoon.
Then they’d work. ‘It was all work,’ Ray says plainly. The boys would hunt rabbits or help dig up the spuds or go out fishing. In winter it was dark by the time they got home, but they’d still have errands. Until Ray was about 10 years old, he and his multitude of siblings would bathe on the open verandah, one after the other. It was that or the river, which is numbingly cold year-round anyway.
Although the children were set to work, no doubt they found occasions for fun. The possibilities of play hover at the periphery of every child’s field of awareness. Even digging potatoes can be a game. A bit older, Ray would go to the dances held in the former school, and his father would play the melodeon. They’d walk six miles each way to mingle with others from the valley; it was around midnight by the time they wandered back. ‘In them days,’ says Ray wistfully, ‘that didn’t worry you too much.’
In a place like Liffey, the landscape blends itself with every aspect of life. Families like the Jordans worked the land, and often had a hard go of it. Rain, earth, boulders, wallabies, trout and timber made up the raw materials of existence; and from these came energy, comfort, humour, rest. Bullocks, sheep, fire, echidnas, shadows, scarlet robins: I have heard countless stories from Liffey through which these figures move. (The most amusing involved some bored teenagers releasing a possum in the old chapel.) These yarns tell where humans meet with the other forces of our environments, and help us see how the world shapes us.
*
One night a while back I was called out to Liffey, looking for a woman who’d gone missing in the scrub at the base of Drys Bluff. At one point I shambled along the road, holding my mobile phone aloft, hoping a wave of signal would meet it. In the moonlight, the kookaburras flying between fenceposts had the aura of guardian angels. A barred bandicoot was bounding around my feet when the police officers appeared.
*
In the Liffey Hall, there’s an undated image in severe chiaroscuro. A family stands before a cottage, smoke wafting from its chimney into the bush. Sawn eucalyptus stumps squat in the damp earth. Nobody smiles. Each family member stands about a metre apart, clothed in black. The father looks gawky, and his suit seems too big for him; the mother looks as grim as a widow, but the baby on her hip glows in a white outfit. It looks like a dewy spring morning, but the two daughters, almost identical, glower as if they’re looking into the future, as if they know the long years and hardships ahead.
The picture is so striking partly because I know what’s beneath its surface. The family would have thought of themselves as pioneer settlers, probably with some pride. The European settlement of the Liffey took place gradually over the course of the second-half of the 1800s. It was hard yakka, and only hardy people endured it. The wonky fence that wanders through the photograph like a slow diagonal slash kept in stock – in theory at least (it looks like the whole thing would buckle if a sheep were to scratch its arse on it). But it’s a symbol of so much more.
It might have demarcated the pioneer’s yard from the wilderness, but in Tasmania, it’s also the metaphorical line in the sand. It’s the division of history, a demarcation of the way this tract of country was used, and by whom.
“It might have demarcated the pioneer’s yard from the wilderness, but in Tasmania, it’s also the metaphorical line in the sand. It’s the division of history, a demarcation of the way this tract of country was used, and by whom.”
Colonisation disrupted everything for the first Tasmanians. Despite that, there are still some places in Tasmania that have a continuous chain of lore and understanding, connected by cultural practices and storytelling. From my understanding, though, Aboriginal dispossession has meant that the bulk of what we know of human history in most places is derived from fragments. There are a few tales from the old people, some art and artefacts, and the notes and anecdotes of colonists.
George Robinson passed through this district on his walking tours around the island, part of his mission – a project of convincing Aboriginal Tasmanians to abandon their native lands for Flinders Island. He came by with Multiyalakina (also known as Eumarrah), an enigmatic Aboriginal leader who joined, for a time, Robinson’s party. He had previously associated with the Stoney Creek people, for whom the Liffey Valley was home. Robinson’s journals tell us that Multiyalakina passed on the traditional name for Drys Bluff, taytitikithika. Like so many of Robinson’s observations on Aboriginal culture, it is the briefest of sketches. We can maybe imagine the scene. It was evening; Robinson’s camp was set up, surrounded by his strange cohort of fellow travellers. Multiyalakina (who was painted by convict artist Thomas Bock) gestured up at the mountain. Robinson asked him to repeat the concatenation of syllables, and by the light of the campfire, penned it down phonetically in his notebook. Perhaps a possum shrieked from somewhere in the bush, or boobooks on their branches hooted cautiously. I can’t read Robinson’s journals without wondering what else he might have known.
I too live beneath the Great Western Tiers, and it strikes me that in the land beneath these dolerite mountains, there is another story, spoken rarely.
“I too live beneath the Great Western Tiers, and it strikes me that in the land beneath these dolerite mountains, there is another story, spoken rarely.”
For most of us, perhaps, it’s hard to talk about. Like a family secret. But if we ignore what’s happened here, we’ll leave too much out of the narrative of our time in this place. It may prevent us from ever actually understanding this country.
*
I’m always intrigued by how a complex biography can be reduced to a laconic quip. ‘See that Beckett up there,’ one fella says to me, pointing at a school photograph of some of the school pupils in the hall’s archives. ‘They say he got into a dispute over a woman further up the Liffey. Apparently he shot at the other bloke.’ The constable arrested Beckett and took him away on a motorbike; the assailant still had the rifle slung over his shoulders.
Also on the wall are a few performance reviews of the old school’s teachers. One teacher, a Mr F Bottomley, was assessed in 1902. Among other things, Bottomley’s speech is disparaged as ‘provincial’. The report continues: ‘As far as I can judge, he is just as eccentric as ever.’
The archives displayed in the hall are museum fragments; these sentences are like shards in the bottom of an archaeologist’s bucket. Bottomley taught at Liffey for several years, but his career has been whittled down to a handful of terse sentences.
‘The actual teaching is good,’ wrote the inspector in 1902.
Reflecting on these stark summaries, I wonder what few statements will sum up my time on this planet. Who will be telling my story in the future?
“Reflecting on these stark summaries, I wonder what few statements will sum up my time on this planet. Who will be telling my story in the future?”
*
From the end of the 1960s and over the course of the following few decades, the Liffey Valley attracted a different type of person – simply remembered as ‘the hippies’. Here, land was cheap, and far-out dreams seemed feasible. The local catchphrase seems to have been, ‘You’ll never make it.’ And most didn’t. But even brief stints in the valley stay fixed in the memory of those who are still here.
Environmentalist, doctor and politician Bob Brown bought a cottage here in 1973. He was one of several new residents who played host to a variety of visitors; these gatherings must’ve intrigued long-standing land-owners here. For several decades Liffey’s reputation was shaped by the interlopers.
‘When my daughter went to school in Launceston,’ one old farmer says, ‘they told her she was from the dope-growing capital of Tasmania.’
“‘When my daughter went to school in Launceston,’ one old farmer says, ‘they told her she was from the dope-growing capital of Tasmania.’”
Disparate worldviews came to share adjacent properties. Some of the new neighbours did indeed last, and almost all of these can say they have friends on the other side of the fence. Time has healed some of the past’s fractures, though not all. There are still disputes over the way land ought to be used. In places like Liffey such conversations have some urgency. Fire is a real threat to the valley, and opinions on forest management depend on divergent beliefs about ecology.
There is wry amusement at the cultural frictions of the past. Arrests and drug busts are recounted in good humour. An unlicensed music festival took place on the river-flats along the main road, using electricity diverted from a neighbouring sawmill. Nearby, there’s a large rock that gets good sun throughout the day. I am told it was one of the hippies’ favourite spots for nude sunbathing – particularly the females, apparently.
I am assured by the gentleman who mentions this detail that, ‘We didn’t pay much attention to that’. I’m a bit suspicious, though, since he remembers it three decades later.
At that time, it seems, the hall had fallen into disuse, until an artist moved in. He painted the exterior of the building bright blue, with a yin-yang symbol over the weatherboards. I am told a number of times that the old school was decorated with ‘psychedelic colours’.
The artist was a leather-worker. I don’t hear much more about him, other than that he came to a tragic end. It seems to sadden anyone who speaks of it – that such sorrow could exist behind the exuberant façade, that the symbol of balance and peace stood before such a troubled soul.
‘It was a real shame,’ one man says, quietly and very sincerely. ‘He was a bloody talented artist.’
“It was a real shame,” one man says, quietly and very sincerely. “He was a bloody talented artist.”
*
Among the archives displayed in the Liffey Hall are several memorials to young soldiers who went to far-off wars and died in distant countries – France or Belgium or Turkey – far from the valley that nurtured their youth, where myrtles and white gums did not grow, and the black cockatoos could not call a dirge for the deceased. But others, I am quickly told, made it through war, and returned to farm the valley or settle somewhere nearby. For more than 50 years, some of these veterans carried on, wounded, with dark memories.
Someone at the market suggests that I try to picture one of these young men returning now, to the Liffey Hall on market day. He’d probably have been a student at the school, she says. Imagine how pleased he’d be to see us all here, happily laughing and gossiping, at peace. Maybe he could sit at the piano, she says, transported by her own concept, and play some of the old songs that would have been popular then.
Outside, pines rise in memory of these soldiers. I squeeze their needles between my fingers, and smell their pungent oils on my fingertips.
“Outside, pines rise in memory of these soldiers. I squeeze their needles between my fingers, and smell their pungent oils on my fingertips.”
Trees can help us keep old stories close. They have a longevity we can’t expect for ourselves. Buildings, too, will often outlast their communities. They offer some continuity, and record the procession of generations that come through, making their marks, leaving behind stories. In such places, we can register the changes we have witnessed in the world, and appreciate what has remained.
I find myself thinking of the flipside of this opportunity. How painful it must be for those whose places have become lost to them, who are left with little contact with the landscapes they once belonged to. It’s an increasingly common reality, one which the Tasmanian philosopher Pete Hay suggests is akin to the experience of exile.
*
In the Liffey Hall, I’ve heard history told. I’ve listened to locals tell overlapping stories as they try to anthologise the history of this place. The tradition of Tasmanian storytelling still exists, complete with a very particular sense and style of language. On one visit, after a couple of hours of trading tales, we disband into a silvery evening. A stiff breeze pushes down the valley. I drive against it to Pages Creek and set up camp for the night. By the fire I pull out a collection of Les Murray’s poems, and find an apposite one-liner: ‘Why does so much of our culture work through yarns?’
*
Once a month, at the Liffey Folk Club, musicians gather to play together. It takes a while to warm up, but eventually someone interrupts the chatter with their instrument. Harp strings are plucked; thumbs are pressed into piano keys. Occasionally we are called upon to form a motley choir.
At one point, a child, Margaret, standing in a wedge of light between the shadows, holds a borrowed fiddle high to her chin. She is in front of the fireplace – where, as Harley Chilcott told me, teachers stationed themselves, warming their backsides. With a nine-year-old’s serious sense of ceremony, Margaret introduces the tune she’ll play, and then performs a jig with candour and clarity. We applaud her gladly.
Then the attention turns to a man I suspect is the oldest in the room. He’s one of those excellent-looking old gentlemen, whose ears have elongated and whose nose sprouts errant hairs. He has a button accordion between his hands, and begins to play a medley of merry songs. Margaret watches intently. When the tunes finish, the old man mentions – in the appropriate accent – that he’s played some ‘English country dances’ for us.
In the Liffey Hall, a child learns something of the distant childhood of this resplendent accordionist, and listens to the wordless stories of his squeezebox.
Drys Bluff falls into a dark dusk. A mandolin player plucks his strings as if searching for a certain sound. I walk outside for air. Margaret is out there, helping a neighbour with some yard work in the last light. ▼
This article appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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